Question

I hope you can help me with this:

I´m writing a App that should show if a shop has actually open.
For this i declared for each day and each opening times different variables / NSDate-Objects like (setting the dateformatter I´ve done before):

    NSDate *mondayMorningOpening = [dateFormatter dateFromString:@"08:00"];
    NSDate *montagMorningClosing = [dateFormatter dateFromString:@"12:30"];
    NSDate *mondayNoonOpening = [dateFormatter dateFromString:@"15:00"];
    NSDate *montagNoonClosing = [dateFormatter dateFromString:@"21:30"];

I´ve also set a NSDate for the actual time:

    NSString *tempDate1 = [dateFormatter stringFromDate:date];
    NSDate *actualTime = [dateFormatter dateFromString:tempDate1];

Now I want to calculate if the actual time is before or after the time range for the opening times of the shop. I´ve done this:

    if ([actualTime earlierDate: mondayMorningClosing && [aktuelleZeit laterDate: mondayMorningOpening])
        {
         NSLog (@"The shop is open!");
        }
    else if ([actualTime earlierDate: mondayNoonClosing]&& [actualTime laterDate: mondayNoonOpening])
        {
         NSLog (@"The shop is open!");
        }
    else
        {
         NSLog (@"The shop is closed!");
        }

But no matter what time it is, it´s always shown “The shop is open!”.

Maybe you have an idea what to do that i can show the opening status right…

Answer 1

You misunderstood the meaning of earlierDate and laterDate.The methods are not “isEarlierDate” and “isLaterDate”, they do not return a BOOL.These methods return a NSDate object, the earlier (or later) of the two dates.They’re not nil objects, so they’re always evaluated to true.

Compare the two dates taking it’s time interval:

if ([actualTime timeIntervalSinceDate: mondayMorningClosing]<0 && [aktuelleZeit timeIntervalSinceDate: mondayMorningOpening]>0)
{
    NSLog (@"The shop is open!");
}